Free While Constrained: Side-Bent, Stepping Down (Patrons)

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Mostly back-lying, some front-lying. Enjoy the rich internal reconfigurations and freedoms that are prompted as you learn how to use your legs and pelvis with ease while your head, spine, ribs, and shoulders are constrained in a gentle side-bent position. Themes of skeletal support and sensing your primary spinal bias are also touched on. This bias is discussed briefly after the lesson.

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Before you begin read this for practical tips and your responsibilities, and check out Comfort & Configuration below.

Recorded live in a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) class, this lesson is copyright Nick Strauss-Klein, for personal use only.

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We offer over 50 free lessons, but this one's just for Patrons. You can learn about it in the free lesson notes and comments below. To access the audio, join The FP at the Patron level. Learn more

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  • Comfort & Configuration
  • Clarifications
  • Curiosities
  • Context
  • Related Lessons
  • Source

Avoid high-friction mats (like a tacky yoga mat) for this lesson.

Before class started I shared an email from one of the students which gets mentioned in the lesson. You can find it in the Curiosities tab.

The pelvis is never lifted completely off the ground in this lesson. Rather one hip is lifted at a time, leading the pelvis to roll along the ground away from it.

This is a great lesson for reversing all the lefts and rights on subsequent listenings. As you learn to sense and connect with your primary spinal bias it’s a useful experiment to try the other side first.

–

Right before the recording picks up I read Laura’s email below to the students in the class, with her permission.

Nick, over the coming weeks, as we work on more challenging lessons, could you talk more about the feeling of wanting to “bolt”—either emotionally, physically, mentally? Someone having SI trouble doesn’t feel that different to me from my nervous system feeling agitated, or like I could just fall asleep. It all feels like resistance. Maybe I’m looking for some failsafe way to resist resistance—haha! I know the rewards are there if we stick with it—I’ve learned that over and over in my life. This all feels very much like a metaphor for the lockdown—how people are alternatively agitated, tired, content, disturbed, happy, sad, energized, or not. I guess I could boil it all down to this, and it’s not even a question, but I’m reminded of how important it is to just stick with ourselves, to be present with our discomfort.

I responded in part with this quote from Sam Harris (philosopher, neuroscientist, and meditation teacher), used during the lesson’s opening scan:

Pay attention to your experience without resistance, without a plan, without making an attempt to change it…. Let your mere attention to sensation puncture whatever state you’re in….

This lesson is found in Patron Treasures, our exclusive collection of lessons for Feldenkrais Project Patron-level donors. It’s also in our Free While Constrained Deep Dive.

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1 Comments

  1. Simon Wacker on July 7, 2025 at 3:24 am

    After working through the whole library in the past 9 months, I just revisited this lesson and found some deep structures to the left of my thoracic spine close to my heart that when activated consciously to side bend made me cry from an old part within and brought up some forgotten childhood memories. Thanks for facilitating this deep and releasing experience through this lesson recording. When I did the lesson for the first time a few months ago I thought that I was already using most muscles on the sides of my spine and now I realize that I had missed important ones. Maybe I put them away for protection decades ago. I found the muscles by really trying to only side bend from the side of the spine with a particular focus on the thoracic vertebrae not helping with the shoulder cloak or “pelvic cloak” at all.

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